Breaking the Habit
by Kita the Spaz
Summary: Sometimes ghosts speak in the dead of the night and refuse to be drowned out by drink. Tsunade reflects on a lost one. Written for ookamikasumi on the prompt of "Breaking the Habit" by Linkin Park.


Title: Breaking the Habit  
Author: kita_the_spaz  
Rating: PG-13  
Written for ookami_kasumi on the prompt "Breaking the Habit" by Linkin Park. Not because she asked, but because the plot wouldn't leave me alone. Hope you like it. Shock of shocks, it's not Kakashi and Iruka.  
Disclaimer: I don't own. No infringement is intended.

He'd loved her. She had known it, no matter the arguments, no matter the accusations about his 'research.' She could see it all so clearly in retrospect. Hindsight was a _bitch._

She downed another cup. _To your memory, you old pervert_. The cup chattered loudly against the lip of the bottle as she poured more. She looked at her own hands in surprise. She could knock down mountains and upstart Kyuubi vessels with them, and yet they now shook like leaves in the wind. She set down the cup and bottle. The drink wasn't dulling the pain. It had stopped doing that a long time ago.

She picked at the memories, each another wound bleeding out things she didn't want to see. The flash of his smile as she berated him about peeking in the bathhouse—at her, no less—how had she not noticed that it was far more genuine than his usually pervert grin?

And she had loved him no less, though she had denied it with the fervor of a once-shattered heart. To hide her own moments of weakness she had instigated arguments and verbal sparring matches. She had spit out cruel words, ones she never meant, and he had done the same. As Sakumo's thrice-damned brat would say, underneath the underneath. Under the venom and barbs, the words that they could not say. _I'm confused. I don't know why I'm fighting you, when I just want to go back to the old days, the easy friendship, the casual flirtation. I want it to be the way it was, before…_

Tsunade brutally shook herself out of her downward spiral of thoughts and glanced over to the low lounge where poor Shizune had fallen into exhausted slumber nearly an hour ago. The girl had been attached to her side like a leech all day, despite the verbal abuse the thoroughly distraught Tsunade had heaped on her. She allowed herself a small, melancholy smile at the sight of her upright aide curled up like a child beneath the green robe Tsunade had draped over her; her features slack in sleep and her hand dangling over the edge of the couch. Despite how positively annoying the girl could be, she was an invaluable assistant, and even a friend, where a woman in her position couldn't afford many of those.

Tsunade sighed and caught sight of herself in the window. She caught her breath. _I look like hell. I almost look my true age._ Looking around her office, she wondered, not for the first time, how she had gotten this way. _I don't know anymore. I don't know why I got this way or even how. And I'm the only one at fault. _Her gaze fell on the bottle and cup sitting where she had left them. She needed another drink to chase away the ghosts that had been haunting her since the word of his death had come.

"_And will you abandon your duty?"_

The cup slipped from her fingers and shattered on the floor. His voice had almost sounded like it was in the room with her. _"No…"_

Tsunade shivered. "My duty? Hah. I'm here, old man, in spite of the fact that Konoha has taken everything I ever loved. Dan, my brother…" _You; _went unsaid.

_I've cracked. I'm talking to ghosts._ Tsunade would have laughed at herself if she could have caught her breath.

"_Who's talking about Konoha, then? I was talking about your duty to him."_

Him. An image flashed in her mind of a boy, now a teen, who looked astonishingly like her long dead brother. Who had his same passion and fire, and who had wanted the same thing as he did… to become Hokage. His eyes had always reminded her of Dan, too. Not in color, but in the love and zest for life her beloved had also had. And in some strange way, he reminded her of her most recent loss. "He's got your stubbornness…" She said aloud to the silent air. "And your pigheaded determination, Jiji."

Her ghosts remained silent but she could feel his approval washing over her. Her gaze fell on the bottle she had left on her desk and she reached for it. And firmly corked it.

She smiled down at Shizune. "You win." She said aloud. "I remember my duty."

She put the bottle away, and for the first time faced the future with something like hope in her heart. No more hiding behind ghosts of pain. No more drowning her sorrows in alcohol.

_I'm breaking the habit tonight. _


End file.
